Don't You Forget About Me

by Mhairi McFarlane

  I sense from this antsy response that Mum isn’t ill at all. This is a set-up, either between the two of them, or Geoffrey’s fibbing?

  ‘What are her symptoms?’ I say.

  ‘Dicky tummy. Bit personal, I don’t think she’d thank me for going into it. Let your mum have a day off being “Mum”, eh?’

  Yet more distilled essence of Geoffrey. You could dab it behind your ears and repel insects. Natural concern for my mum, reconfigured as me being demanding.

  At least he didn’t say she’s ‘walked into a door’. I ponder briefly if he’d be capable and decide he’s far more of a mental torturer.

  ‘It gives us a chance for a catch-up,’ he adds, greasily, and I realise I’ve been tricked. Ugh they’ve said: something something two of you bonding. Resentment and apprehensiveness settles over me.

  ‘How have you been?’ he asks.

  ‘Fine, thanks, really good,’ I say, emphatically. ‘You?’

  ‘Oh you know. Trucking along. Still working at that pub?’

  He knows I am.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going well, is it?’

  ‘It’s good, it’s great, actually,’ I say. ‘It’s proper Victoriana but with mod cons, my favourite sort of pub. They’ve really turned it around. And they seem very responsible owners. A world away from That’s Amore! And the food’s good too. Soup and sandwiches and so on, but by keeping it basic, they’ve kept it good. No Thai banquet-meets-Venetian-small-plates-fusion sort of over-reach.’

  I stop short of suggesting they pop in and try it. I can see Geoffrey’s ‘smelling guff’ face over his Gala Pie.

  ‘Can working in a pub really be great?’ Geoffrey says, and my ire rises. This is the danger of a one-to-one, there are no restraining influences on either of us.

  ‘Yes, when it’s a nice place to be, and you like the customers and the bosses.’

  Geoffrey stirs his tea and looks round the room in an infuriating silence, designed to express doubt or indifference.

  My God, every time I’m in his company, I remember I’m right to dislike him. It’s a fact-based position. I vaguely worried I’d chosen a flamboyant aversion because it was loyal to Dad, and made me the smart one – contrasting stylishly with Esther’s policy of appeasement. Luxuriating in what Esther calls my Little Sister Freedoms. (I.e. she’ll be sensible so I don’t have to be.)

  But I’m not imagining this: Geoffrey’s mixture of pompous disregard and unconcealed contempt is borderline obnoxious. When I say he’s not rude, what I really mean is he’s male and moneyed and got to that age where we allow him his chosen degree of rude as some sort of social entitlement, along with his bus pass.

  ‘It’s not exactly bristling with prospects, though, is it?’

  ‘Well … I could end up running it. The owners are from Irela—’

  Geoffrey isn’t listening.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. How about I get you a job at my old company? Secretarial stuff. You might have to do a typing speed course first but I feel certain I’ve got the clout to swing it. Another ex-company partner Kenneth’s got two of his daughters in there and one of them is a complete fright. Piercings all over her and hideous tattoos. I can’t see how they can say no to you, if you smarten your act up a bit. What do you say?’

  I open my mouth but Geoffrey continues:

  ‘Your mother thinks it’s a fabulous idea. She says to tell you if you accept, she’ll take you shopping. Get you some new threads,’ he prods a finger towards my pink fluffy coat, hung over the back of my chair. ‘Something more befitting a woman who’s chalked up the Big Three Oh.’

  And … here it is. Geoffrey’s been sent on a mission to sort me out. What part of this plan didn’t strike Mum as utterly abysmal?

  ‘It could be like that bit in Pretty Woman,’ I say, smiling sweetly, confident now I’ve got his number. ‘I too would be grateful to be rescued from my life as a call girl by a wealthy businessman.’

  Geoffrey startles and then manages to return my smile, a twitch of the mouth. I bet he thinks it’s possible I’ll end up turning tricks.

  ‘And you might want to tone down your, er, anarchic funnies on the shop floor. Not everyone will get it.’

  I swallow, and effortfully set aside the usual barrage of insults which Geoffrey wrapped this offer in.

  ‘That’s very nice of you and I’ll definitely think about it.’

  ‘Ah, the polite brush-off. Come on, Georgina, I may be quite a lot older than you but I’m not some dotty old relic you can condescend towards.’

  Wow. I swallow hard. I don’t want a fight but Geoffrey’s not leaving me much choice. I push my Elephant’s Foot away an inch, because clearly the ‘faking it’ part of this is over.

  ‘What do you expect me to say? “Yes, thanks, can I start Monday and never mind The Wicker, I’ll text them my resignation right now”? I have commitments, I have a job.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, your indispensability to some grotty boozer! Yes, I am sure they’ll be scouring Yorkshire trying to find another person with opposable thumbs, capable of placing a glass on a counter top and counting coins. It’ll be like that hunt for a pop star programme. Soda Pop Idol hahaha.’

  My blood was warm, and now it’s hot. How fucking dare he.

  ‘I’ve got an idea, Geoffrey. Why don’t you treat me as an intelligent adult, with some respect, I’ll do the same for you, and we’ll see how it goes?’

  ‘The trouble with that is, dear girl, you’re not treating yourself with any respect. Thirty years of age, no qualifications, not a pot to piss in, roaring around town like a teenager, bringing unsuitable fellas home to meet your parents. You really worry your mother, you know. It’s selfish.’

  ‘Do I,’ I spit. ‘That’s a shame. She worries me too.’

  ‘Then there’s this bolshie attitude. Why won’t you listen to people who want to help you? You’re still young enough you could turn things around, but you need to look lively.’

  I stand up and begin to gather my things, including the offensively cheap pink coat.

  ‘Geoffrey, thank you for your time, but I’m not listening to you because you’re being incredibly presumptuous and unpleasant and acting like you have the right to tell me my life is a disaster.’

  ‘… Isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, seriously, up yours.’

  Geoffrey changes colour, to a deep magenta.

  I detect from the movement of eyes around us that every table in proximity has been listening in.

  ‘Don’t you dare walk out on me, or I promise you, you’ll regret it,’ Geoffrey hisses, with a beetling menace. Not a man used to having women defy him.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are, my dad?’ I say, no longer in full control of myself.

  ‘Good God, no.’ Geoffrey does an exaggerated reel back. ‘I’m twice the man that useless adulterer was.’

  I walk out, which I could promise Geoffrey, whatever he thinks, is preferable to anything I’d have said if I’d stayed.

  So Mum knew about the affair, then. What a way to find out. And for all Geoffrey knew or cared, that could’ve just been the way I found out, too. Virulent dislike is now hatred.

  25

  As I power home at double the usual speed, clammy with exertion and indignance, I replay the encounter and anticipate the tsunami of familial aggravation this is going to unleash.

  Somewhere around Cobden View Road, a long forgotten conversation comes back to me.

  It wasn’t one of the big days in our romance. It wouldn’t make the highlights reel, the supercut. Although for Lucas, as it turns out, none of it qualified. Even to me, it was filler, really, a moment between the moments, when nothing of note happened, which is why I’d not remembered it until now.

  It was a scorching day in the Botanical Gardens, a heavy heat, bees sounded drunk on it. Lucas and I were supposed to be contemplating the character of Edgar Linton: is he sympathetic, and is Cathy using him to torture Heathcliff?

  ‘T
hat is such a male question,’ I’d said, as a welcome light breeze riffled the ring binder, stuffed with our notes. ‘As if everything Cathy does has to be seen through the prism of Heathcliff’s feelings for her,’ I’d said. ‘That’s why I can’t get on with it. It’s as if she’s the only one with any responsibility for bad decisions. She has to protect their love for both of them.’

  ‘She does go off, fall for someone else and marry him, even though she knows she loves Heathcliff more. Definite spoke in the wheel for soulmates.’ Lucas was so articulate and opinionated behind the quiet counsel he kept at school, and it was still a lesson to me. I’d always assumed the interesting people were the mouthy ones.

  ‘But Heathcliff becomes a monster. It’s as if the monstrousness is her fault.’

  ‘I think he thinks he would never do what she did. His head would never have been turned by someone else like hers was and he can’t forgive her that weakness. It sends him mad. He’s sent mad by the fact he knows she knew it was the wrong thing to do, and she did it anyway. He can’t follow her logic.’

  ‘Sounds like when my dad was teaching my mum to drive.’

  I got a laugh, but it was a lazy joke, and quite rightly the laugh was hollow.

  After a good fifteen minutes of discussing the set text’s subtext, we were soon once again exploring just how much fumbling we could get away with, how near fingertips under outer clothing could slide towards key anatomical areas.

  When things became too exciting, one or the other of us would pull away and try to discipline a further period of talking. This time it was Lucas. I remember his faded red Converse with grubby laces, his arm round me as I leaned on his shoulder.

  How did he taste so right, smell so alluring? It turned out when they talked about ‘chemistry’ it wasn’t only that 1940s screwball film thing where you riffed off one another, it was something primal.

  He murmured something into the top of my head and I said: ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  Lucas drew back. ‘I said: you’re so delicate …’

  ‘Delicate?’

  It seemed an unlikely word for an eighteen-year-old male and when I met his eyes, I could tell Lucas felt self-conscious at having used it.

  ‘It’s like your bones are skinny,’ he said, circling my wrist with his finger and thumb.

  I was delighted, and surprised.

  ‘My mum says I’m tubby,’ I said, and Lucas laughed.

  ‘… Really? Is she joking?’

  ‘Oh no, she always says stuff like that.’

  ‘Tubby is like a word you’d use for a bear. Paddington Bear.’

  ‘And my nose is too broad at the tip for me to ever be considered a “classical beauty”, apparently.’

  I would never have told Lucas this, mere weeks previous, in case he started to think of me as Miss Potato Schnozz. But in the runaway train that was falling in love, I was increasingly confident of his admiration of how I looked, and I wanted him to know everything about me. ‘Being interesting’ won out over the shame of sharing these slights. So I suppose some vanity was still involved.

  Lucas frowned and stared at my nose.

  ‘What a weird thing to say. I mean even if you had a nose the size of a shoe, which you don’t, what a weird, unkind thing to say to your kid.’

  I mimicked my mother’s voice.

  ‘You are pretty, Georgina, but you are not beautiful, so don’t expect it to carry you in life. Be nice to people and plan to work for what you have. Men’s heads are very easily turned by better options.’

  ‘Woah what the?! That’s horrible,’ Lucas said. I could see him really feeling it, on my behalf, and then I wished I hadn’t told him. She’d been in an exceptionally bad mood that day. There wasn’t much chance of him ever liking her now, I hadn’t considered that. I’d made her sound like Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

  ‘Why would your mum say stuff like that?’

  I could see he was genuinely affected. Ours was a big love, I thought. It reminded me of when we studied Othello last year, but with Lucas as Desdemona. ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them.’ I’d forgotten at that moment that Othello is one of the tragedies.

  I drew my knees up to my chest, and said, with slightly affected world weary maturity: ‘It’s her generation, the whole mindset. She was a real “knockout” in her youth and she’s never worked, and got married to my dad at twenty-one. She thinks my prospects in life are based on my appearance, because hers were. It’s all about marrying a well-off man and firing out kids.’

  I drew breath. I’d barely said this to anyone, only Jo.

  ‘… She’s not happy with Dad, but she won’t leave him because she doesn’t want to be a fifty-something divorcee, with a lower standard of lifestyle. She says as much when they fight. It’s not her fault – when she lashes out at me, she thinks she’s warning me, stopping me from ending up like her.’

  Lucas and I sat in silence.

  ‘It is her fault,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘She made the wrong choices in life, they made her unhappy. Unhappy people take it out on others.’ That I knew all this came as a surprise to me. Lucas had a way of making me surprise myself.

  ‘If I made choices that made me unhappy, I’d un-make those choices,’ Lucas said. ‘Not take it out on anyone else.’

  I agreed, and we beamed at each in other in the certainty and simplicity of this conviction.

  After the fourth missed call from Esther, I get a terse ‘Why are you avoiding me, I haven’t done anything?’ text, and I relent, and ring her on the way to work the next morning.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘At last!’

  ‘I’m walking to the pub so I’ll have to go in a minute.’

  ‘That’s handy.’

  ‘Esther, if you’re going to start on me, seriously, don’t bother. I’m never speaking to that arsehole again.’

  ‘By which you mean Geoff?’

  ‘By which I mean Geoff.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘It’s someone’s terrier, and a bus.’

  I find a quieter route, as Esther says: ‘I forget you don’t have a car.’

  ‘You sound like Geoff!’

  ‘Look, I don’t blame you for being annoyed, I would be too. But however badly done, the intentions were good …’

  ‘If we’re going to play the intentions-were-good game to let him off the hook, so were mine. I intended a choux bun, instead I got told that I’m a clueless tart who’s ruined her life.’

  ‘Don’t have a go at me, I’m trying to play peacemaker.’

  ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor!’

  ‘Oh my GOD have you been on Twitter too much again?’

  Esther laughs and I grudgingly grin into my iPhone handset. I’d thought I was going to be spluttering indignantly at her, but having slept on this helps.

  I am bruised and sore but as the fog of battle clears, I don’t want to treat Esther as a punch bag and their proxy, I want her on my side. We won’t see it exactly the same way, but maybe that’s a good thing.

  I can’t bring myself to speak to my mother though. I don’t want her explanations yet. I’m not ready to accept them.

  ‘You know what upset me the most?’ I say. ‘He had the fucking nerve to tell me that I’m a worry to Mum. In what world does he have the right to say things like that? I didn’t say, yes well, it worries us our mum married a controlling old creep.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve told Mum it was really stupid to have Geoffrey be the messenger. I get the impression that wasn’t the plan at first and then he took over.’

  ‘Hah, well I never!’

  ‘I think his offer of the job gave him the whip hand.’

  ‘Ugh, can you imagine how awful it would be if I took that? Lording it over me, telling me off … he wants power over me like he has over Mum.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve told Mum, it’d be a recipe f
or disaster.’

  I know a hefty dollop of me is in Esther’s Recipe For Disaster, so say nothing.

  ‘Can I ask you to consider something that you won’t have considered?’ Esther says. ‘Mum needs us.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I mean, she really needs us, Gog. I think it’s a potentially abusive if not actually abusive relationship and if she’s ever going to find it in her to stand up to him, she can’t do that while she’s feuding with her daughters over him.’

  ‘You don’t think he …?’

  ‘Hits her? God, no. Or I’d be staging an intervention. But there are other types of abuse.’

  ‘What are you saying I should do differently?’

  ‘Keep Geoffrey sweet enough and things creaking along. There are bigger things at stake. He is who he is but he’s our stepfather and we can’t do anything about that. We can support Mum, and help her towards realising he doesn’t get to push her around, simply because the credit cards are in his name.’

  I’ve arrived at work now and check my trendily throwback-slash-plastic cheap Casio watch, under the grubby cuff of pink fluff.

  ‘I dunno. I know you’re smart about these things, Est, but I don’t think me pretending not to loathe him is going to make much difference.’

  ‘Not true. He’s very susceptible to flattery. And you can be very dazzling when you try, even when it’s insincere.’

  I guffaw. ‘Geoff’s got a better opinion of me than this! He doesn’t think I can fake charm at all.’

  ‘Look, I’m a head person and you’re a heart person and I love you for being a heart person a lot of the time, but I’m asking you to be more head on this.’

  ‘You’re asking me to give Geoffrey head?’

  ‘GEORGINA! Urrrrgh.’

  ‘Why can’t he treat himself to a nice big coronary? We’ll just have to serve him lots of extra brandy butter at Christmas and encourage him to buy a midlife crisis Harley.’

  ‘Midlife suggests Geoffrey is going to live to 134.’

  ‘God, please no. Embalmed in his own spite.’

  ‘In the meantime, will you answer your phone to Mum? She’s giving me loads of grief.’

  This prospect gives me a hard pain in my throat.